Daniel11chapter 11

This is the most detailed stretch of predictive history in the Bible, and reading it alongside a history book is startling. Persia's later kings, then a mighty Greek king whose realm is broken up and given to others than his posterity — Alexander's empire went to his generals, not his family.

After that the chapter tracks two of those pieces: the "king of the south," the Ptolemies who ruled Egypt, and the "king of the north," the Seleucids who ruled Syria. Judea sat directly between them and changed hands repeatedly. The marriage alliances, the broken treaties, and the back-and-forth campaigns described here all line up with recorded events of the third and second centuries BC.

The chapter's last long section describes a northern king who scorns the God of his fathers, profanes the sanctuary, takes away the daily sacrifice, and sets up an abomination that makes desolate. Antiochus IV did all of this in 167 BC, and the Jewish revolt that followed under the Maccabees is why Hanukkah exists.

The precision here is the whole argument about Daniel's date. A pagan critic named Porphyry made the point in the third century AD: it is so accurate, he said, that it must have been written afterward. Christian readers answered then and answer now that God can tell the future. The book presents itself as a sixth-century record and MannaFest reads it that way. The dispute is old and still live, and it carries weight — the seventy-weeks chronology of chapter 9 rests on the earlier date.